Krishna Raj Bagale DEVELOPMENT OF A GEOLOCATION APP IN IOS PLATFORM AND ITS MARKET ANALYSIS DEVELOPMENT OF A GEOLOCATION APP IN IOS PLATFORM AND ITS MARKET ANALYSIS Krishna Raj Bagale Bachelor’s thesis Spring 2016 Information Technology Oulu University of Applied Sciences ABSTRACT Oulu University of Applied Sciences Information Technology, Engineering Department Author: Krishna Raj Bagale Title of the bachelor’s thesis: Development of a Geolocation App in Ios Platform and its market analysis. Supervisor: Kari Laitinen Term and year of completion: 2016 Number of pages: 43 The main aim of this Bachelor’s thesis was to describe the development of a geo location app for the iOS platform and analyze its market value. The main objective includes severe research and analysis on iOS platform since it was my job to develop an application for iOS. Earlier, an android version of this application had been developed. IOS application has been developed using the newest Apple’s language called Swift. This thesis is the result of a research on a prototype of an application developed for all kind of ages, mostly the young generation, the development on the iOS platform and an analysis of the overall market strategy, which focuses on user tracking and determining how many users are inside in a certain bar or pub for the first time. Later on it can be updated for other services, too. The application can be developed further if the WEi! manager wants to build more features, and the study goes on continuing. Keywords: iOS, Geolocation, Market Analysis, Git PREFACE Based on the findings of this research, the idea was surveyed in different places with over 280 people and it was very amiable to start in Oulu city. I would like to thank Francisco Coquillat Colombás for his insightful scheme and my tutor teacher Kari Laitinen for being there as a supportive tool throughout my thesis project. Finally, thanks to all the developer team members for being so patient when the process was slowing due to many reasons including the errors, which occurred in the Swift language for novice users like me. April 2016, Oulu Krishna Bagale 4 CONTENTS ABSTRACT 3 PREFACE 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 VOCABULARY 6 1 INTRODUCTION 7 1.1 Team Structure 8 2 USED TECHNOLOGIES 9 2.1 Apple iOS 9 2.2 Version Control 11 2.2.1 Git 13 2.2.2 gitHub 15 2.3 Swift Programming Language 16 2.4 SDK(Software Development Kit) 18 2.4.1 Xcode IDE(Integrated Development Enviornment) 18 2.4.2 iPhone Simulator 20 2.5 Segue Between View Controllers 21 3 THE GEOLOCATION APP 24 3.1 How It Works 24 3.2 Implementation 26 4 USER INTERFACE 28 5 NATIVE APPLICATION 29 6 MARKETING STRATEGY 30 6.1 Application Survey 31 6.2 Market Analysis/Customer Analysis 36 6.3 SWOT Analysis 38 5 CONCLUSION 39 REFERENCES 41 APPENDICES 43 5 TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS Android studio Android’s IDE App Application API Application Programming Interface GIT Version Control Software GPS Global Positioning System GUI Graphical User Interface iOS iPhone Operating System OS Operating System PDF Portable Document Format UI User Interface Xcode Apple’s IDE IDE Integrated Development Environment SDK Software Development kit VCS Version Control System WEI! Where Everybody is!(Application’s full form) 2G Second Generation of Mobile Telephone Technology 6 1 INTRODUCTION WEi! will be the first available application nowadays that allows you to spot the most popular places and events around the city, it displays useful information such as the male/female ratio or how crowded some place is, so you can decide whether to go or not to a bar, depending on your interests. Also, having a big stable user base, an analytics platform for business owners will be provided so that they have a better understanding of the demographics around their premis- es so that they can make business changes according to them. Available for all the main different mobile Operating Systems, in which a normal user (i.e. who is going to use the application for the purpose of what the application is meant to display) would be able to see in real time how many people there are in a bar/club/event/establishment/retail unit/beach or any traceable space. The users would have a possibility to see a map where to select the desired locations, and see the information. They would also have on the display the percentage of people according to the capacity, and the percentage of each gender. Additionally, they would be able to see the events coming, as well as other interesting information for the user. A feature that WEi! is going to inte- grate as well will be the possibility to add to a wish list their favorite places so that they do not have to find them every time. A professional user would have some more options in addition to normal user capabilities to benefit their busi- ness/businesses. They would have a possibility to add events inside their estab- lishment and to sell tickets through it, thus increasing their revenue. Also they would have a possibility to promote their establishment inside the app by advertisements. Additionally, they would have analytics to see the amount of people and percentage of each gender at any given time interval. The attractive of WEi! is simply a business idea that has been proven to be successful due to competitor analysis. The only competitor is not developing any activity regarding the common business idea with WEi!. In fact, even though the company still exists, it already announced its closing due to privacy and legal issues which WEi! will not have due to different technology and form of operation. 7 1.1 Team Structure My job was to develop an application on the iOS platform. TABLE 1. Showing our WEi! team structure. Name Nationality Role Tasks Carlos Paraguay Co-Founder Consultant VonEckarts- berg Alessandro Italian Co-Founder, as-Consultant Esposito sistant Marketing assistant Alberto Guer-Spain Chief developer Main developer. In charge of ra back-end and correct devel- opment as well as best prac- tices AlvaroMahillo Spain Android Develop-UI development for Android er version Francisco- Spain Co-Founder, De-General developing assis- Coquillat veloper Assistant tance. Graphic designer Coordinator CamiliaKoljo- Finland Marketing Strate-In charge of market research nen gist and development of marketing plan Krishna Raj Nepal iOS developer iOS developer working closely Bagale with Android developers 8 2 USED TECHNOLOGIES 2.1 Apple iOS iPhone OS is a UNIX-based mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc. It was published on 29 June 2007 with the first iPhone 2G and it is designed to be used with a touch screen. Since its release, iOS has gone on to become a mul- ti-platform operating system that powers many other hardware devices devel- oped by Apple. It is the second most popular operating system after Android. Augmented reality applications have changed the way applications used to be back in days. Browsing the real world like browsing the web allows us to recog- nise things and get immediate information. Apple revealed iPhone SDK to de- velop applications for the iPhone operating system. Originally it is Cisco’s core operating system. 270,000 iPhones were sold in first two days of its release. [1] Figure 1. iOS Layers. [1] iOS OS runs on iPhone, iPod touch, Apple TV and iPad devices. As shown in the figure 1, iOS is built on four different layers. These four layers interact with the hardware. Core Os is closer to the hardware. Core OS is built on the 4. X BSD Unix cornel so it is low level programming. It is associated with networks, 9 sockets and file systems. It is mostly built with a C language and there is abso- lutely no object orientation. Core Services is a common service for both MAC OSX and iOS OS. It contains programming concepts and collections like threads, arrays, and dictionaries. It includes everything that we want to connect to core OS. It is object oriented. It contains the Core Foundation and Foundation frameworks. This layer also con- tains individual technologies to support features such as location, iCloud, social media, and networking. Media layer deals with multiple services including talking over the phone, tex- ting, taking pictures, reading PDF files, playing games. This basically means that it contains the graphics, audio, and video technologies. Without the media layer a phone could be a dumb phone. It is associated with a class and meth- ods that can be used easily unlike low level on other layers. iOS provides a built-in support for apps running on either Retina displays or standard-resolution displays. For vector-based drawing, the system frameworks automatically use the extra pixels of a Retina display to improve the crispness of your content. Cocoa Touch includes buttons, text fields, labels, alerts, navigation controls, multiple tab bars and scrolling which are called a user interface kit framework. It is completely object oriented. There is no need to worry about low-level pro- gramming. Cocoa touch allows the use of hardware and features that are not found in Mac OS X computers and are thus unique to the iOS range of devices. Cocoa Touch provides key frameworks like Foundation Kit framework, UiKit Framework, GameKit Framework, iAd Framework, MapKit Framework, Address book UI framework, EventKit UI framework, Message UI Framework, Notifica- tion Center Framework, PushKit Framework, and Twitter Framework for devel- oping applications on devices running iOS. 10 2.2 Version Control Version control, also known as revision control or source control is a system that keeps logs to a file or set of files and records its changes so that it is possi- ble to recall specific version later.